Former President Donald J. Trump offered a glowing assessment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday amid reports that the liberal scion would end his troubled independent presidential campaign and was considering endorsing him.
Both of them are scheduled to be in Arizona on Friday, which has fueled speculation that an alliance is in the works between the two men, who have long been friendly but sparred on social media a few months ago. Mr. Trump, calling into “Fox & Friends,” a show that he frequently appears on, welcomed the prospect on Thursday morning.
“As you know, he’s a little different kind of a guy, very smart guy and a very good person,” Trump said. “If he endorsed me, I would be honored by it. I would be very honored by it. He really has his heart in the right place.”
Mr. Trump’s praise for Mr. Kennedy deviated sharply from his remarks in April, when he wrote a series of social media posts calling Mr. Kennedy “a Democrat ‘Plant,’ a Radical Left Liberal” as polls began showing an overlap between their core supporters. Before then, Democrats harbored greater concerns that Mr. Kennedy could play the role of a spoiler after his short-lived primary challenge against President Biden.
In one of those posts on his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump declared that a vote for Mr. Kennedy would be a wasted protest vote. Mr. Kennedy countered a day later, saying that Mr. Trump’s post sounded “unhinged.”
A leaked video of a phone call in July between the two men, on the day after the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump, offered a behind-the-scenes look into Mr. Trump’s efforts to coax Mr. Kennedy out of the race and into his camp. They also met in person in Milwaukee ahead of the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Trump’s conversation with the Fox morning show hosts was book-ended by the final two nights of the Democratic convention in Chicago, where the party’s luminaries have sought to cast the former president as a threat to democracy who puts his personal interests ahead of the country’s.
Mr. Trump jabbed back on Thursday at Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, who in accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president the previous night asserted that Mr. Trump would enact a national abortion ban if re-elected and carry out the Project 2025 agenda, a set of far-right proposals to overhaul the federal government that was crafted in part by former members of the Trump administration. Mr. Trump, who has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and falsely said he knew nothing about it, called Mr. Walz a “lightweight” on Thursday morning and mocked his experience as a high school football coach.
“They call him coach,” he said. “He’s a semi-coach, if he coached some football for a little while.”
Mr. Trump also accused the Biden-Harris administration, without evidence, of manipulating employment figures to make its economic record look better than it was. His comments echoed his line of attack during a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, when the Labor Department announced revised jobs numbers that found the U.S. economy had added roughly 818,000 fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than previously reported.
“They defrauded the people of our country with the job numbers,” he said on Fox.
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